Friday, January 22, 2016

Mapping Missing Airplanes

Vanished Aeroplanes is a CartoDB created map of aircraft which have gone missing around the world. The map says that 'all positions are approximate' so my guess is that the panes have been mapped to their last known locations.

Looking at the map my immediate thought was that there appears to be a cluster of planes which have gone missing around the 'Bermuda Triangle', the Carribean and Central America. I can't help wondering how much the Gulf Stream and hurricane winds may have contributed to the disappearance of some of the planes in this area.

All the planes on the map are labelled to show the year that they went missing. A timeline, or an option to filter the planes by month of disappearance, might have been useful. For example, in that Bermuda Triangle cluster I'd like to be able to filter the map to show how many of the planes disappeared during the hurricane season. However, if you mouse-over the markers you can find out the month each plane disappeared and more information about each individual plane and its number of passengers.

There is also a little cluster of missing planes over and around Vietnam. From the year labels it appears that all these planes seem to have disappeared during the Vietnam War.